Paper short abstract:

Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, a famed biodiversity hotspot and cherished place for scientists and environmentalists, has long been imagined as a “wild frontier” region – a circumscription that serves to produce frictions among many regional actors, including those within the ecotourism sector.

Paper long abstract:

Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula has seen increased interest in ecotourism given the popularity of Corcovado National Park’s rainforest and the famed “wild frontier” characterizations therein. While this biodiversity “hotspot” is cherished by environmentalists, it’s also a conduit for narcotrafficking and illicit tropical hardwoods; and, in a country where tourism dominates foreign currency exchange, economic undercurrents beneath activism, science, and sustainability-minded conservation are pronounced.

This area is characterized by Costa Rican urbanites and others as “the wild west,” echoing fantasies of a wild frontier as portrayed by golden-era Hollywood. This type of “frontier” rhetoric is often used to excuse or explain (or at least stereotype) vice, informal economies, illicit activities, socio-political chaos, assumed anarchy, and other expected outputs from familiar caricatures that never grasp the complexity of the politics of everyday life. The concept of the “frontier” can be metaphorically applied to the constitution and limitations of the human; and when looking ethnographically, there’s an intriguing collision of ideas – human, animal, organized, chaotic, illicit, legitimate, natural, and social.

Based upon original ethnographic case studies and other research, I examine the “frontier” metaphor in relation to southwest Costa Rica. Here, different conceptualizations of nature appear for the campesino in contrast with the environmental activist, as for the poaching gold miner versus the park ranger, and as well for the foreign tourist or the local entrepreneur. The commodification of nature as an experience to be consumed offers anthropologists a fruitful endeavor seeking to know how the “wild” and “frontier” imaginaries are employed.